of Chocolate and Other Substances
by A.Pseudonym
Summary: When some mafia goon slips Mello drugs, things take a turn for the totally expected. Contains traces of actual... you know... yaoi. Erm. No plot, just a bit of fun, and an exercise in writing stuff I don't. Ever. Until now. Somewhat experimental style.


It came to him out of nowhere, crashed into his overworked brain and froze his spine in position. The cunt must have slipped something into his drink. It was the only feasible explanation. He had grabbed Mello's arse and slipped something into his drink, and it didn't matter how good a friend he was to Rod; he had to die.

Matt was driving and the neon signs buzzed around the cabriolet like fire flies on the last stretch out of town. Ducking down from the desert wind, Mello had autopsied the innards of the glove compartment, but the chocolate was a mere memory, empty wrappers, lost to the night. He was sweating. The radio was stuck on some seventies station, a loop of sound trying to twist his body around like some mechanised ballerina. Control. He needed it; it was his life-line, his occupation, his _thing_, but it had evaporated at the touch of the unknown substance and left behind a burning thirst for revenge. Revenge and chocolate.

"What? What, Mello, what?" Matt shouted over the blustery night, trying to pin down Mello's eyes.

"Turn back! I'll fucking kill him, turn the car around!"

Matt's gloves clutched the steering wheel like two black spiders and the road kept tearing past beneath their feet. Past the last outpost. Sand and darkness. Mello felt for his gun, the solidity of the metal a tenuous link to sanity at best.

"We're not going back. We're lucky to have got out alive. What were you thinking?"

Matt's cigarette left a vapour trail and Mello wanted to follow it back. Find the cunt and his drugs and ram the barrel of the gun down his throat. He had stolen the most valuable thing Mello had – his self control. Now the world was a dark circus and Matt's eyes huge and unreliable plastic. He needed to get off this flying carpet.

"Jesus Mello sit the fuck down!"

Matt grabbed him with those spidery butcher's gloves and yanked him back onto the cream leather upholstery. The car swerved, slowed, and with a rocking motion came to a stop.

"Let go, I'm going to kill that cunt! He fucking drugged me! He drugged me!"

Mello clambered over the car door and his boots hit the sand. The town was miles behind them and the sky a spinning kaleidoscope of stars.

He heard himself screaming, a torrent of the coarsest profanities he knew, and then it was punctuated by a slap of rubber across his face. Matt had hit him open handed, but the look on his face said the next time he would use his fist. It was an intolerable inversion of the roles, and it was all the cunt's fault. Him and his pills, him and his drinks, him and his sweaty fucking hand that didn't understand a plain no. He was a nobody; some hopeless white trash offspring of the unkempt Ross family tree. Cousin something, favours and connections. Rod let him get away with murder, and murder was exactly what would happen when Mello got a hold of him.

That matter however, had just been postponed. Mello's face hurt. Matt had bitch-slapped him right across the cheek, and that didn't happen.

"I had to." Matt said. "You were losing it. I'll do it again."

"He put something in my drink! How can I let that go? They'll laugh at me!"

"I'm not saying let it go." Matt dropped his cigarette and trampled it into the sand. "But you're in no state to take anyone on now. You're off your tits man!"

A slow sliding smile and the cunt wasn't the only one laughing at him. Mello quivered in his leather casing, sweating rage through every pore. The gun was in his hand and for the shortest, photo-finish second, he wanted to point it at Matt's smug, grinning face. He closed his eyes and breathed. Then he launched his fist like a latex missile bound for that breakable button nose.

His aim was off, he caught Matt's chin. Hard bone, it hurt his hand more than Matt's face, and then he was grabbed forcibly and thrown in the car. The radio wailed and the night was like an oven. He clung to the edge of the seat and pictured the cunt at the end of his gun, lying on the floor, white fear and blood red art. The engine roared to life and they were on their way again. Mello hoped Matt knew where to, because he had absolutely no idea.

*

The motel was a stereotypical affair. Fifties-style sign, pay by the hour rooms; poor air-conditioning and one uncooperative vending machine. Mello dialled chocolate like it was 911 on the panel, but the springs wouldn't turn for him. Fucking world. Every little thing was full of hatred for him tonight.

"It doesn't take pound coins, genius."

Matt, dropping quarters in the slot. The metal chimed and the chocolate dropped for him. It was an unfair climate. But Matt shared like a perfect gentleman. American dog-chocolate, cocoa flavoured contents of a Hoover bag. What he wouldn't do for a Yorkie bar right now. But it was better than nothing.

The room was dim; vacancy sign light through the window, flashing. Mello's head was a jungle of tangled thoughts. The unknown substance rocketed through his bloodstream, picking up speed. His tongue was sandpaper and his hands restless birds. Matt was talking at him, so he focussed to hear, tuning an invisible dial until he could make out the words, "...painkillers? My jaw is hurting like a bastard after what you did."

"Check the bag."

There was a loose foil sheet of pills in clear plastic domes, only one gone. Mello vaguely remembered the crippling head-ache from earlier, and some faceless mafia goon giving him the tablets. He took one right before going in the club and...

"Matt, wait!"

Too late. Matt put a can of coke down and shrugged his shoulders.

"Show me that!"

Mello grabbed the pills. No text on the foil, nothing on the pills themselves. Stupid, stupid, reckless and dangerous. The cunt had nothing to do with it; Mello had walked right into this one. He started laughing. Matt frowned, and the room was sliding. Mello fell back on the bed and cramps of laughter wracked his body. It wasn't funny in the slightest.

"It wasn't him! I would have killed him for nothing! Well, he did touch my ass, the fucking faggot..."

"Ah, Mello, come on. I agree it was out of line, but there's no need for bigotry. I never had you pegged as a homophobe."

Waves of a strange frequency radiated from Matt. Mello couldn't decipher the code of awkwardness. Or, to tell the truth, he couldn't be bothered. His eyes slipped off the surface of Matt's face, leaving indifference in their wake.

The ceiling was a twisting mass of off-white stucco, hiding a thousand tiny faces. The damage was done and the revenge irrelevant. There was a bottle of tequila somewhere in the bag too, another gift, and sure, why not?

"Matt, get the drink. We're on the merry go round, might as well get on the big horse..."

"You make no sense." But Matt unscrewed the cap and swigged the bottle. "You realise we'll have to stay the night then. I'm not driving drunk with you raving and carrying on beside me."

Mello laughed and took the bottle off him. The taste was bliss on his parched lips. Then the penny dropped across the room and Matt spoke out loud. "Oh shit. Oh shit, Mello, they weren't painkillers. Bloody hell... it's like a fucking disco in here! Give me that!"

Mello found the radio; music cut through the heat. The flashing sign and the pharmaceutical fuel mixed with the drink and blurred out the world. The beat infiltrated his system, never roots soaking in liquor, and he let the tune grab his strings and move him. He danced like a flame. The heat was getting too much, shiny and hard on his skin; it was going to bake him like a potato.

The music was visible in the night-thick air. Mello reached out and grabbed handfuls. The room was small and the notes littered the floor in droves. He kept slipping on them. In the periphery of his warped vision, he saw Matt jump up and move to the rhythm, jerkily, like a malfunctioning robot. They were both nothing but cases for the life inside them.

Time slipped, liquid. Matt jumped from the bed, flying through the room with a super hero cape ripped from a hollow aluminium sound. The shower curtain rod was bare. Mello dug his nails into the carpet pile and wondered why nothing would grow. The flashing light was day and night and his heart beat was so loud it drowned out the music. His clothes were trying to eat him alive. Matt attempted to cut them with his eyes, but it was doing nothing.

"What you looking at?" The words left Mello's mouth, flying on autopilot through the drunken haze, dodging notes and concentrated blobs of night heat.

"It's hard not to, you're everywhere."

Matt had the bottle he wanted. He reached for it and tangled his limbs in the black and white stripes of Matt's jumper.

"Way to prove my point." Matt said, trying to find some small space.

A gravity shift knocked Mello over, and he couldn't move, except reach for the bottle and align it poorly with his face. God, the heat!

"You're a river," Matt said from far off. "I mean... you're all wet. And sort of... flowy..."

Mello's insides tickled. Matt was trying to make sense; he fought the stream of consciousness, tried to force the words back in their boxes, and it made Mello laugh.

"Control freak!" He said, fighting the weight of the heat to mountaineer up to where he could see Matt's eyes.

"Glass house. I mean, stones. I..."

"I know what you know that you mean!" He paused. Matt was quiet, staring at him with huge orange lenses. Mello reached out, across a gulf of years and conditioned distance. "I want to see the world through your eyes..."

He pulled the goggles from the skin, wondering if it hurt. They were a part of Matt, and he had never dreamt of touching that before. Too private. They weren't that close. A business deal was a business deal. But, perhaps Matt could be trusted, to some small extent. He was still here, and he was keeping him company on the merry go round. It was more than anyone else had ever done.

The room caught fire but faded rapidly to an old photograph. Matt's face was golden though the new eyes and so naked. Mello was invincible, the gravity shifted again, and he was pulled to his feet. The music used him anew.

"Gimme... Mello!"

Matt was broadcasting wishes, but now the code was all wrong. The smile on his lips looked sweeter than the chocolate Mello had already finished. A gloveless hand reached out and brought him back to the precarious surface of the bed.

"Shit, you're..."

"What?" He needed a close-up of that smile. The goggles lifted and vanished. The air was crackling in the inch gap between their faces.

"I'm roasting alive." Matt squirmed in his stripes, like a danger-patterned snake moulting. The shower curtain cape was discarded on the floor. His new skin was silk shine of an unnameable colour. Not quite pink and not quite yellow; no word that Mello knew. "Aren't you dying in that leather?"

Mello's lungs had turned into a medical ventilator, accelerating. There was a shine in Matt's freed eyes that resonated inside him. This was new. He wanted it. He didn't even know what it was.

"Mello, you're looking at me."

"You're a great hue. You." His laughter made him weak, and he slumped against Matt's yielding frame. Arms closed around him; a protective rather than restraining cage. How many years since someone had held him? Who was that someone? Roger? Earlier even? Mr. Wammy? Some faceless social worker? His mother? The unknown number of years lit a panic inside him. He wanted to struggle out of this unnatural embrace, but he couldn't. His body wouldn't move. And when a hand stroked his back, gently, he fought tears instead.

"Matt, don't. Don't..."

"Chill. I won't touch your arse."

"No, stupid! That's not it! I don't care about that..."

The restrictions of language and social conventions, so deeply ingrained that not even the substance could banish them completely, bound his tongue and stopped his explanations. Matt couldn't be told how wrong he was. Only thing remaining was a demonstration.

He forced his head from Matt's shoulder and followed the trail of his jaw line. Slick salinity chased the tip of his tongue to smokier ground. A warm hand on his lungs pushed the breath from his chest, and it was like not wanting to get out of the shower. That wet caressing heat, impossibly soft velvet texture. The world narrowed to rest on his lips, then expanded rapidly as he was reborn to arms length.

"Mello, stop. You're... the drugs talking."

"No."

Not at all. The sweat-slicked shine of Matt's chest in the darkness of the flashing neon, contours and shapes and the driving heart-beat rhythm of the radio was this moment. Nothing else, no obligations or competitions; this was the pulse of the universe, right there, on the side of Matt's neck, barely brushed by some tousled strands of hair.

"It's okay? You sure?"

Matt reached out and touched his hair like Mello had a nightmare, one of those few, rare times in days long gone. He had promised to wake Mello up when he made noises in the night. But the last time he'd come to sit on the edge of Mello's bed and push the hair out of his face, the noises had not been due to a nightmare. Puberty'd had Mello a hair's breadth from pulling him into the bed. Déjà vu.

"It is."

Mello shrugged out of the black baking foil vest and Matt let him back down. Skin on skin, tiny hairs on end, gooseflesh in the heat. Their breath merged to one, and perhaps it was the substance, but he could feel life-force passing back and forth. They kissed again, a drawn out exploration of a different taste. Tequila and smoke and chocolate and life. Life.

Too much was not enough. There was cutting, twisting, coarse-hot fabric in the way. Mello wanted to shed his skin, but got no grip. The angle was all wrong. A low rumbling earthquake beneath him told him Matt found something funny, and then he was rolled over. The bed was soft beneath him, the air so large and light. Matt floated up, away from him, and that was unwanted now.

"Stop grabbing! Mellow, Mello... Stall the ball..."

Matt grabbed the bottle and drank greedily, then stroked Mello's chest, like planning a route on a map. It tickled and pushed at his patience. The leather on his legs was fusing to his skin, painful in places, but the laces were an insurmountable tangle of friction-free spaghetti. Frustration was setting in.

"So help me then!"

"You want to get naked?"

"It's hot!"

"It is hot."

"You do it."

Mello reclaimed the bottle and sucked it like a child. It emptied in seconds. The bed was swinging like a pirate ship, and Matt wasn't doing what he was told. Mello dropped the empty bottle. It clunked dully on the floor, just as a song ended,

"Ah forget it." Mello started gathering his sprawled limbs to drop off the bed. Then Matt sprung into action.

"No! Stay. I'll do it."

His face was deep red as he fumbled with Mello's laces. The pressure eased at last as wonderfully cool air hit his legs. Mello stretched luxuriously, basking in the neon and the feeling of nothing save for thin cotton on his skin.

"Mels... wow... you're..."

"Aren't you?"

"Well... yeah..."

Mello knew, in the part of his mind that had been left in storage back on Earth, that there was wrongness and trouble down this path. But a song he really liked came on, and the look on Matt's flushed face was much too much to let go. He thrust out his hand, slim alabaster fingers through the night, and touched.

His head spun. His body quivered. His focus concentrated into hot-spots and the tactile melody was building to a crescendo. Matt played along his beat with noises like tiny explosions, and a bass tone was flowing from his own lungs, rising, falling; unceasing. Hands were touching every inch of his skin, and even the thin cotton was left behind. The lava pooled in concentrated streams, hyper sensitive, desperately seeking friction. Matt was moving over him, like a boomerang from his lips, always returning. His flexible game-playing fingers were pressing new buttons, and Mello could hear incoherent babbling that might just be words escaping the unguarded gate of his own mouth. He never thought his vocabulary contained words of begging, but here they came parading out, proving him wrong. For the moment, he didn't care. The tingling inside, the chiming of nerves, the pure pleasure as Matt's hand at long last drifted down, was enough to let him let go. Just tonight, just this once, just while the substance raged through him, and it was this hot, and everything slick, and just while Matt was touching him like _that_ – it was alright. The mafia could go die, Kira could wait until after this pressure cooker was vented. If it wasn't, his head would detonate and splatter the cheap wallpaper with tequila and blood.

Now. Harder. Sheets and pillows. Soft. Hard. Hot, so, so hot! Steel and satin. Rhythmic motion. Grabbing, feeling, tasting. Faster. Pressure, movement, taste, spiralling up, up. The heat in his hand turned liquid and Matt moaned a sound that was enough for the pressure to give and blow clean out of him in a fountain of ear-popping, back-bending force. The flashing light stopped. The darkness was a velvet-lined bag and this time, the arms around him didn't make him cry.

*

Matt was driving, and the neon signs of the city were turned off, pale and worn in the grey morning light. Mello felt like a pig shat in his head, and waves of nausea washed up every time he turned his head too fast. He sank into the leather upholstery and closed his eyes. The radio was off and the only sound the whoosh of the miles disappearing under the tyres. Out of the desert and into real life. Neither of them had spoken a word since waking, tangled in sheets and each-other, bodily fluids cooled to a crust. The fragmented memories of last night were complete enough to form a unequivocal picture. There was no denying what had happened, and no chance denying it. He could see the way Matt's eyes skittered away when he came to close to meeting them. Rain started falling in huge, heavy drops, splattering the windshield and their faces. Rather than pull over and put the top up, Matt switched on the wipers and drove on. Mello was glad. The rain cooled his blushing face.

Their flat looked grim. Empty cabinets and peeling wallpaper. The light was stark and lead-grey, draining the colour out of the day.

Matt dumped the bag on the coffee table and lit a cigarette. Mello wished that he could have gone to Rod's, but they didn't expect him back for another 24 hours. Most of them would be severely hung over from the party yesterday. There might be trouble when he went back. He remembered threatening someone with his gun. Then again, he had done before and got away with it. They expected it from him now.

He found a half eaten bar of chocolate on a shelf of the bookcase and nibbled at it to calm his nerves. This couldn't continue. He had to work with Matt. His whole plan depended on it. The air had to be cleared.

"Matt."

Matt turned, blowing out smoke and looking like he was fighting hard to feign calm. Perhaps he expected a telling off. Threats and drama. Well, he would have to be surprised then.

"About last night..."

"It was the drugs, I know. No worries. I was out of it! Heh. And you were really bad... "  
Mello felt a smile tug at his lips.

"I was bad, huh? Well, I haven't had much practice you know."

It was pure entertainment, seeing Matt turn an impossibly deep shade of scarlet.

"I didn't mean that! I mean, you were... you know what I mean. Fuck's sake Mello..."  
Mello sank down into the sofa. He felt better now. The nausea had receded and his head wasn't pounding quite so badly.

"Still. I think we should talk about it. Sit."

Matt killed the cigarette and ground it into the ash-tray noticeably more thoroughly than usual. Then he sat down, slowly, as far away from Mello as the sofa would allow.

"So." Mello said after a few moments of silence. "It seems like... we had... sex. With each-other."

Matt stared at the carpet, grimy with hair and dust and chocolate crumbs. Mello could almost feel the heat rising off his face. He did feel a little heated himself. Not the heat of last night, but...

Clear memory fragments flashed in his mind. Hands on skin. Moaning sounds in his ear, replaced by a wet tongue. He laughed and fanned his face with a hand.

"Yeah, so... do you have anything to say, Matt?"

"It wasn't just my fault! You were the one who wanted to get naked because it was hot, and you were the one who started licking my face and..."

"Alright! Calm down. I... take responsibility for starting it. I do. But don't try and say you weren't into it, or that I made you do it, or some such shit, because I seem to remember..."  
He didn't make it further before Matt grabbed his shoulders. Matt had undoubtedly intended to cut him off with a kiss, but lost his nerve, and now his mouth was hovering a few inches from Mello's, and the look in his eyes said he expected a slap or worse.

Well, he'd have to be surprised again.

Mello closed the small gap between them and pressed his lips against the half-open mouth before him. Matt froze in surprise, then kissed back. Without the drugs and alcohol, the sensation was that much more nuanced. The idea was no better now than last night, but just for now, with the tip of his tongue skating over soft skin, and the quivering touch of Matt's hands sliding down his arms, just for now, he could it that go. He pulled Matt down on the sofa, silently thanking the cunt who had given him the drugs. Thanks, but he didn't need them any more.

--

_A/N: There's a reference to one of my favourite films in this. If anyone can guess what it is, I'll be very impressed._

_This was hard to write. My inner censor was screaming all the way. I can't write sex scenes. I don't. But now I have, and I hope it's okay. Suggestions for improvement – and any comments - are always welcome! _


End file.
